The Grammarian and the Dervish: Comments on Family, Marriage, Science, Environmentalism & Ways of Knowing

This is a comment on Idris Shah's story "The Grammarian and the Dervish" and its relationship to ecopsychology and specifically the ways that mainstream science has skeptically refused to accept the data on global warming. Sufi stories are full of humor, but these stories are said to have seven layers of meaning that speak to us at different developmental stages of our life.

"One dark night a dervish was passing a dry well when he heard a cry for help from below. 'What is the matter?' he called down. 'I am a grammarian, and I have unfortunately fallen, due to my ignorance of the path, into this deep well, in which I am now all but immobilized,' responded the other. 'Hold friend, and I'll fetch a ladder and a rope,' said the dervish. 'One moment, please!' said the grammarian. 'Your grammar and diction are faulty; be good enough to ammend them.' 'If that is so much more important than the essentials,' shouted the dervish, 'you had best stay where you are until I have learned to speak properly.' And he went [on] his way" (Shah: 193, 1970).

Besides the recognition that humor is good medicine for healing a way of life that has gone to pieces, what is the relationship betwen this Sufi story and humankind's ability to remember our indigenous pathways toward knowing and understanding? Overall this story is making reference to the dark night of the scholar, which Jurgen W. Kremer has described as ". . . a descent into the darkness and chaos thus far excommunicated from the field of legitimate inquiry" (Kremer: 169, 1992); this descent is represented by the grammarian falling into the well. The grammarian represents the received epistemological (ways of knowing) paradigm of EuroAmerican science, whose analytic orientation has become so all consuming that it has become an end in itself. It is this ignorance of the epistemological path or our pathways to knowing that has resulted in the grammarian's misfortune of falling into a dry well from which he cannot escape. The dervish in this story represents those of us that are wandering through the darkness in search of deeper and more highly integrated patterns of wholeness. This search for wholeness is also the search for relationship, the search for family, and the hope of keeping a marriage together.

The grammarian is unable to free himself from the well because he refuses to abandon the quest for truth and understanding as it has been defined by EuroAmerican science. The grammarian represents the kind of person that refuses to believe that "global warming" is a crisis that all the nations of the world, especially the industrial nations, need to be doing something about. People that are oriented toward the grammarian's worldview have lost sight of the essential meaning of the philosophy of science: how does science enrich us? Grammarian's seem to be oblivious to the essential existential problems facing us in our everyday world. Telling us that before we can begin to deal with any of these essentials we must first correct our grammar, that is, we must first demonstrate without a doubt that the scientific indicators pointing to the dangers of "global warming" are statistically significant. Arguing from this point of view, the grammarian continues to say that the scientific data being collected to support global warming are insignificant compared to the overall geological timscale.

References

Kremer, Jurgen W. (1992). "The Dark Night of the Scholar: Reflections on Culture and Ways of Knowing." ReVision, 14 (4), 169-178.

Shah, Idris. (1970). "The Grammarian and the Dervish." "Tales of the Dervishes." New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc.